24 Mistakes Parents Won’t Make With Their Kids

14.

“Choosing your partner over your child is a big one for my childhood. My ex-stepdad used to emotionally and mentally abuse me day in, day out. I ate too much, I was worthless, I was stupid, I was pathetic, I was a waste of space, and everyone would have been happier if I’d fucked off to Australia with my dad. My bedroom wasn’t *my* bedroom, it was my ‘room to use.’ I had literally no boundaries — he would just fling my door open, look round, usually laugh at what I was doing (because the idea that I could read was hilarious somehow), then disappear again.”

“No one ever stood up for me so I didn’t know how to stand up for myself until I was 29. With my own kids, I’m overly protective to a point where my partner reminds my kids (gently, I might add) to clean their room like I asked or do the dishes like I asked, and I’m jumping down his throat. It’s a lot to undo.”

—zoe020113

“For me, it’s the fact that my parents (who had me at 18, and divorced when I was 12) consistently chose their love interests post-divorce over parenting me and my younger sister. It wasn’t a short-lived thing; it went on to the extent that when my mom remarried and the man didn’t like us, he gave me and my sister a choice: pay rent or leave. We were 16 and 14, respectively, and my mom went along with it. I’m now a parent of a 15-year-old, and I would literally take felony murder charges before I would let some man treat my kid like that.

PS: Our dad was an active alcoholic who was in and out of mental health facilities and homelessness, so he wasn’t any help or refuge. My sister ended up moving across the country with random second cousins, and I moved out on my own at 16.”

—jenm47faa724d